Mr. Seán Coughlan:

It is interesting. Other jurisdictions have definitely looked at this and put in place structures that are either limited by guarantee with no share capital, which allows no profits to be distributed out to owners, or limited companies with share capital. For example, in the UK there CICs - community interest companies - which allow ownership of a company, which is a legal structure, but they limit the amount of profits that can be returned to the owners. If the company is not profitable, there is nothing to give out, but if the company is profitable, there is a cap on how much of those profits can be returned to owners or shareholders. Anything in excess of that has to be reinvested back into the social mission.

What this does, interestingly, is open up investment in capital markets to those companies to which they would not otherwise have access. Commercial investors may want to get some return on their investment. As a result of the social mission, they may be prepared to take below-market rate returns on their investment but they do not want to give the money and get nothing back for it. Therefore, one opens up a whole new class of capital for investment, which is a good thing.

In the US, another take on this is that companies that had a social mission built into them were very reluctant to invest a substantial part of their profits back into that social mission because, essentially, they could get sued by their shareholders for not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility, which is to maximise shareholder profit and value. Therefore, there is a new company entity in the US, called the B Corp or benefit corporation. This allows a company to legally insert a social mission into a for-profit company. The company is still profitable but it protects the company from litigation in the event that it actually grows and wants to give something back to society. California was one of the first states in the US to introduce this legislation and many of the US states are starting to introduce this structure, on a state-by-state basis.

In answer to the Deputy's question, we do not have anything like that here. There are either two options. It is either a company with share capital or a company limited by guarantee. There are definitely models in other jurisdictions we could look to, and this is definitely something I would encourage us to do going forward.